This is a great and wonderful law school, and I
feel it all the more after having had a chance to speak
and talk with some of your colleagues. Beth Hogan looked
up at me, and she had stars in her eyes as she talked
about the law, and there was an idealism in them all
that's positively contagious.

It was 37 years ago that I stood in your place.
I never dreamed that the law would give me the opportunity
it has to try to make the world safer, healthier, a
better, freer place to live for all people, but it has,
and it has been the most wonderful opportunity that
anybody could have. I ask of you, do not lose the
idealism that I have seen in this group today. Carry it
forward. Wear it as a banner and enjoy the law and all
its challenges as much as I have.

But I would like to challenge us all, the
profession, Northwestern Law School, Northwestern
University, alumni, and those who graduate today, for we
have a golden opportunity to enhance the rule of law, to
build better communities and to ensure a safer, freer
nation if we use the law and the work that's done here at
Northwestern in the right way.

The Center for Wrongful Conviction, The Children
and Family Justice Center, The Center for International
Human Rights are all examples of great efforts that you
have undertaken.

And your strategic plan caught my eye: Promote
the faculty to scholarship, not only informs and
challenges students, academia and the profession, but also
contributes to resolving the leading issues of the day. I
like that and would like to challenge you to consider two
leading issues of the day at which faculty, graduates and
all of us can engage in a more effective manner than we
have.

Crime is down now eight years in a row in this
country, but it is still far too high and there is still
too much violence. Children in the United States are
nearly 12 times more likely to die from a gunshot wound
than children in the 25 other wealthiest industrialized
nations in the world. Violence does not have to be.

And from 1992 to 1996, this city had 3,063 gun
homicides, Toronto, of equal size, had 100. Violence does
not have to be in this nation if we approach it in the
right direction. But what we've tended to do is send the
prosecutor out to prosecute and get a conviction and think
they've won the battle when they send the person off to
jail. And send the public defender out to protect and
defend, and he or she thinks that they have done so when
they get their clients off on a motion to dismiss or
motion to suppress, forgetting the fact that the person is
in the grips of a drug addiction. That's the worst prison
than any one we would send him to.

The street worker who engages in prevention
doesn't work with the school teacher. The corrections
officer is off by himself. The policeman is trying his
best under difficult circumstances. We have not been
educated to deal with the whole picture as it relates to
crime in this nation and our community, and there is no
real training in the universities of our country that
teaches us how to look at the picture as a whole and
connect the pieces.

And Civil Rights, we must do everything we can
to guard against discrimination, to address the issue of
racial profiling, and to consider the lack of diversity in
this nation, but we choose to do it so often by
litigation. There is no one that prepares us for giving
every American the tool, from the time they are born, to
grow in a strong and positive way and participate in the
opportunity of America.

I urge this great university, this law school,
and most of all, those who are graduating today, to take
the lead in addressing the leading issues of the day by
looking beyond narrow specialties and the law; to look at
the whole problem of crime and unequal treatment in this
country; to teach us to work together between disciplines
in a unified manner with the academia, with other
professions, with the people of this country; to address
the problems and to teach leaders to be managers and
volunteers to serve communities and knowing how to
organize so that we look at the problem as a whole. That
would include criminal justice, public health -- you need
a public health school, President, to go with your
wonderful efforts in the criminal justice -- education,
science, psychology, social works, statistics, management
-- lawyers don't know how to manage -- medicine, mental
health.

Northwestern could reach out to others and could
work with community colleges across the country to help
America address these issues.

And then I suggest, Larry, if you go back to the
"Washington Post" or wherever you go, and it's just going
to be that way, you can, with the spirit that you
exhibited here, and your colleagues, with the spirit that
I have seen, can make a difference in your communities if
you're going to be the best transaction lawyer who never
looks at criminal justice, but you can help a community
define itself in a way that much more effectively
addresses the issue of crime in America.

Define the community, identify resources, and
consider the whole picture. Ensure public confidence in
the traditional institutions. Lawyers are not very good at
explaining themselves or the law or the system. Explain
what you do so people will have confidence in why you are
doing it. Nothing is more frustrating than a prosecutor
suggesting that we can't prosecute a case for a variety of
reasons, and then not being able to explain why they can't
prosecute the case. The public doesn't understand.

Communicate in small, old words that create the
moral force of the law. That is really the power behind
it. Law is issued from the will of mankind. It's issued
from the people. They're framed by mutual confidence, and
they're sanctioned from the light of reasoning. They have
to come from the whole, not just from some legislature or
some judge handing down the law.

Surprisingly enough, cameras in the courtroom
create an understanding if done right. It is so important
that we are accountable as we explain the law.

In policing, we can do so much more if we look
at it in an interdisciplinary way, and if we look at it
from the point of view of what universities and the
professions can do together. Police officers can learn to
communicate more effectively by tone of voice, by body
language.

To talk to young people who have been in
trouble, they say one thing they most need is somebody to
talk to, somebody who understands how hard it is to grow
up in America today, somebody that knows how to treat them
with respect, without putting them down, somebody who
knows when to give them a pat on the back and when to give
them a firm no.

How we do this can be enhanced by psychologists
working with police officers as they train, by young
people and police officers coming together to learn how to
talk to each other. This university and others could be
great forces in taking policing to a new level that we
have not known in its most effective manner.

The level of problem solving, of looking at
problems in communities that cause crime, that's
identifying people who are in trouble, the communities
that are in trouble and designing programs within that
neighborhood or on that block that make a difference.

Prosecutors. This law school has taken the
lead, and this university has taken the lead through the
center for making sure that innocent people don't get
prosecuted. But are prosecutors taught around this
country regularly how to avoid the charging of an innocent
person? Are they taught about the problems associated
with eyewitness testimony? Are they taught about what has
happened in previous cases where people have been proven
innocent, what caused the guilty conviction to take place?
Are they taught the tools of science?

Let us bring the scientists and the prosecutors
together, not when they develop the first case in which
they're going to use DNA, but regularly throughout their
education so that we make sure that innocent people are
not prosecuted.

And let us always make sure that we prosecute
the guilty according to principles of due process and fair
play.

Then let us build partnerships. The feds used
to come down when I was a local prosecutor and say, We
want this, this and this. And we know better than you, and
we'll give you this grant if you do that. And we used to
look at them and say, What do you know about Miami? What
do you know about its needs and resources and its
problems? Why don't you listen to us and form a two-way
street in which we can solve the problem together?

Design a comprehensive effort. There's a
tendency in this world to go from extreme to extreme
without ever stopping with a proper balance. First, it's
rehabilitation, then it's put them all in prison and throw
the key away, and nobody thinks that there might be a
balance in between where prevention, punishment, after
care, intervention, treatment are all essential parts of
the equation.

Then it is important to get the facts. We tend
to pursue the criminal justice problem and the crime
problem with just a lead here and a lead there. A
detective gets a lead, turns it over to the prosecutor,
they work together building the case, and they take out
the tenth most important drug organization in the
community, while number one through nine are flourishing.

Let us use our automation that we have today.
Let us use the analytical skills that we have today to
analyze the crime in a community. Is it a drug
organization? Is it domestic violence? Is it child
abuse? Is it a youth gang? What is the problem? Where is
it occurring, and what census track? How is it happening?
What is this armed career criminal doing? Do we need to
renew our efforts against him?

Let us use our smarts to identify what the
problem really is, then let us understand the demographics
in the community for the next ten years. Are we going to
see an increase in the number of young people? That's a
dangerous sign if we already are confronted by youth
violence. That means that we've got to put more emphasis
on prevention programs for those younger than 12 and work
together with everyone concerned to focus on the
13-year-olds.

Are we seeing an increase in elder abuse? Are
the number of elderly increasing? How do we react? How
do we design a community that focuses on the whole?

And then we've got to take what resources we
have and focus them in the wisest manner possible. And
you, as lawyers from this law school, have an opportunity
to make a difference.

Let us start with zero to three. And you say,
Why zero to three? If 50% of all learned human response
is learned in the first year of life, if the concept of
reward and punishment is developed in the first three
years, what good are all the prisons going to be 20 years
from now if that child does not understand punishment?
What good are all the great educational institutions going
to be? And what good is affirmative action going to be if
that child never learns in that first year the learned
responses that are so critical?

We have got to make sure as we address these
ages that parents are old enough, wise enough and
financially able enough to properly care for a child.
People talk glibly about teaching parenting skills. You
don't teach parenting skills in one course, but
universities across this country could better inform young
parents and better inform us as to how we get young
parents to be better parents.

But one of the keys that no university system is
going to solve, because it hasn't solved the problem for
itself, but what we are going to have to solve, and it is
going to be your great challenge, is how we create time in
our workplace and give both parents the opportunity for
professional advancement, while at the same time providing
quality time with their children.

I remember my afternoons after school and in the
summertime, my mother taught us to play baseball, to bake
cakes, to appreciate Beethoven's Symphony. She spanked us
and loved us with all of her heart and taught us to play
fair, and there's no childcare in the world that will ever
be a substitute for her in our life.

As you go out, either with elderly parents who
need love and care, or with children that come into this
world, make sure that you tell those employers, what have
you got to say about family life and opportunity to be
with children? Not just in those first three years, but
for the soccer game and the school recital and all the
times that come thereafter?

If we can send a person to the moon, this nation
ought to be able to organize itself so that parents can
spend quality time with their children and still hold the
position as Attorney General.

Let this great medical school work with this
great law school, with others, to see how we design a
program that makes sure that every child in America has
proper prenatal care and proper healthcare. It is wrong
for a nation of this wealth to not have that exist.

The child who watches his father beat his mother
even at the earliest of life comes to accept violence as a
way of life. This nation has begun to focus on domestic
violence, but doctors, lawyers, must start much earlier in
the criminal justice system, and we must look at the whole
picture and organize ourselves better by getting doctors
to figure out what they do when they first see a patient
to warn them about the problems associated with domestic
violence, and people know that this is unacceptable and
that they do not have to accept it and that there are
alternatives through shelters and otherwise.

But this nation has got to come to grips with
the problem, and as we have seen crime go down eight years
in a row, we've got to see domestic violence go down in
this nation.

And in public schools, they can do so much, but
something is wrong with the nation that pays its football
players in the six digit figures and pays its school
teachers what we pay them.

And in safety, we can do so much in terms of
truancy prevention and other efforts if educators
understand the criminal justice system and vice versa and
exchange information in appropriate ways.

Let us take our enforcement apparatus and figure
out what the most important priorities are. Design with
federal, state and local authorities efforts at surgically
getting at the crime problems that are most important in
the community, and let us be prepared, as we have never
been before, to deal with the issues of cyber crime.
Again, the law school, the university systems, can do so
much, both in terms of preventing cyber crime and working
together with us to help solve these terrible situations.

We can do the same in Civil Rights. We can give
to young people opportunities that they didn't have. Why
do we wait until we consider affirmative action in law
school and universities? Why don't we start considering
affirmative action when children come into the world and
make sure that they are prepared from the beginning?

If we look at the whole picture, we can make a
more effective difference in both these leading issues of
the day.

But, finally, for all that we do, we must do
more.

It has been a privilege for me to meet with my
colleagues from the emerging democracies of Eastern
Europe, to see the stars in their eyes and the joy in
their voice as they talk about the wonderful initiative
that they have undertaken to bring democracy to their
country. And then I see the frustration, and I see them
stumble and fail on too many occasions.

I see established democracies struggling to come
out of a tyranny that developed. Do not take your
democracy and your freedoms for granted. Cherish them and
give them your best. That means supporting the rule of
law. That means speaking out, speaking out against hatred
in this nation, hatred that undermines the very fabric of
our society. Haters are cowards, and when confronted,
they will back down.

The rule of law and majority rule will not work
unless we establish stronger foundations of mutual
understanding and tolerance, and that requires that we
speak out positively, candidly and constructively, not
without vindictiveness and spite, but with purpose, with
collegiality, with thoughtfulness. Unless we do, we will
see segments of society alienated, outraged, and violent.

Let us work together to listen to each other
with a listening ear, to talk with respect, to understand
and try to put ourselves in the shoes of others, and go
forth to lead this land we love, and to build stronger
communities and to give the children that come today the
opportunities for tomorrow.

You are a wonderful group of lawyers. When
people ask me about the legal profession, I have only but
to look at the new lawyers that I have met in this year
and feel very confident that the profession is in great
and able hands. Go and have a good time with the law.